Saturday, 3 November 2012

Early in
this book Seamus Heaney describes ‘The Conway Stewart’, a newly purchased
fountain pen, “The nib uncapped, / treating it to its first deep snorkel / In a
newly opened ink-bottle.” Heaney may live in the age of the email and the text
message, but his interest in writing implements goes back to the start, when he
compared his pen to a spade that digs deep. He is avid for pencils, paper, the
traditional means of getting a poem on the record. Importantly, this poem is
reprised later in the collection when he uses the voice of Colum Cille, the
great saint of Iona:

My hand is
cramped from penwork.

My quill
has a tapered point.

Its
bird-mouth issues a blue-dark

Beetle-sparkle
of ink.

Wisdom
keeps welling in streams

From my
fine-drawn sallow hand:

Riverrun on
the vellum

Of ink from
green-skinned holly.

My small
runny pen keeps going

Through
books, through thick and thin,

To enrich
the scholars’ holdings –

Penwork
that cramps my hand.

The first
verse evokes the illuminated world of medieval Ireland, the second signs in on
the Joycean project of continuity in Irish writing (riverrun is the giveaway
opening word of Finnegans Wake), while the third verse finds the poet already
toying with the prospect of his future readership. Has Heaney put enough
conundrums in his work to have the scholars working for centuries?

Placed
together, these two smaller poems in the book remind us of one of Heaney’s
favourite interests, which is also one of his favourite techniques, joining
together the new world with the old world. The learning of ancient Ireland and
the classical world is used to explain and dramatise the learning experience of
Heaney himself in his own short time on Earth. Undoubtedly the standout example
in this accomplished metier here is a poem called ‘Route 110’, where a trip on
the bus from Smithfield Market, second-hand copy of Virgil in hand, parallels
or re-enacts Aeneid IV itself, a trip into the Underworld.

In finding
words to describe Seamus Heaney’s poetry I come up with seemly, humane,
rational, revelatory, steady, traditional, sane, grounded. Somewhere in his
voluminous interview book ‘Stepping Stones’ (2008) Heaney early “wanted
pressure and density, wasn’t susceptible to freewheeling rhythm and
full-frontal statement,” and it is his dedication to “pressure and density” in
poetry that marks all of his work. Compression is at work in the title poem,
four short verses to describe lifting the load:

With a grip
on two sack corners,

Two packed
wads of grain I’d worked to lugs

To give me
purchase, ready for the heave

This serves
both to identify with others he has seen doing the same and to remind himself
of his, and our, mortality:

That quick
unburdening, backbreak’s truest payback,

A letting
go which will not come again.

Or it will,
once. And for all.

The human
chain is not only the line of people moving the sacks, it is any line of people
moving the essentials for living. The human chain is the process of doing
things together, often without a word (or poem) spoken. But as the last verse
just testified, the human chain is also the backbone, the links of the spinal
column that make possible all of this work, the straightened chain that makes us
all human.

The quality
of Heaney’s success is measured in how he can say all of these things without
aphorism or footnote, in the matter-of-fact relay of a simple observation, the
diction seemingly inevitable, the words plain as day. John Banville remarks
that “in these marvellous poems Heaney displays all that sweetness and ease of
gesture, that colloquial accommodation, that are the unmissable traits of his
art.”

Another
standard towards which Heaney strives is forcibleness, “what sets the seal of
inevitability on much of the best writing.” It is “the attitude that makes you
feel the lines have been decreed, that there has been no fussy picking and
choosing of words but instead a surge of utterance.” His ordered cadences and
pedalling of tones come at us familiarly in this latest collection. Mortality
is the drive behind a pair of riddles titled ‘Uncoupled’. The poet asks:

Who is this
coming to the ash-pit

Walking
tall, as if in a procession,

Bearing in
front of her a slender pan

No
question-make is attached to this question, as if the actual answer is not
nearly as important as the wonder of wondering who this person is, in and of
herself. Likewise in Part II:

Who is
this, not much higher than the cattle,

Working his
way towards me through the pen,

His
ashplant in one hand.

The book
puts in a new perspective his large corpus of personal memory poetry, the
staking out of a value system learnt in childhood and put to the test by
extreme circumstance. Memory poems fill Heaney’s space, have done from the start,
normally less autobiographical excursions than attempts at moments of presence,
of meaning drawn back from chaos through the existence of others, family,
friends, even strangers and as in this case, his parents. At the end of the
poem his father is called away by voices

So that his
eyes leave mine and I know

The pain of
loss before I know the term.

Even the
use of the little word ‘term’ discloses Heaney’s mastery. ‘Term’ in the sense
of the “the meaning of the word”, but also the term of his father’s life, and
his own life. At times, the brilliant and meticulous measure of his lines sound
like the last word in Johnsonian impeccability.

Like Les
Murray, the most well-known living poet in Australia, Heaney writes a largely
rural poetry that is bought by a largely city readership. Both employ versions
of pastoral as the basic lay of the land for exploring other ideas and
emotions. Heaney is not antipathetic to the urban, unlike Murray who makes a
show of his antagonism toward city life and city dwellers, but at times I
wonder if part of the attraction of these poets is how they satisfy the
romantic desire for a nostalgia world they rarely experienced, or don’t know at
all. Heaney’s poetry often depicts a safer Ireland of childhood and youth,
pre-bookish, pre-academic, and significantly, pre-Troubles. In an interview in
The Irish Times Heaney even points to a state of being that brought this poetry
about. “I think that post-1994, post the cessation of violence, the cessations,
something changed in me, something changed in everybody. Things were restored
to a more equable condition. Actually, I realised how deprived we had been
really for 25 years,” and later he continues, “... in the 1970s and 1980s, the
inner being of anybody conscious and answerable on the island was cornered in a
different way than now. The spirit is in a different posture, and now it’s
opener, it’s less battened down, less huddled.”

One other
theme that Heaney readers are more conscious of with each passing year is
summarised in the words of Colum Cille:

Derry I
cherish ever.

It is calm,
it is clear.

Crowds of
white angels on their rounds

At every
corner.

These are
the words of self-imposed exile, of someone looking back at a world that is all
his, but cannot be anymore. Heaney’s residence in the Republic now takes up a
fair proportion of his life and with it a body of work seeking meaning in a
place, the North, upon which he may meditate at length. Whether in the icon of
his childhood or the still unresolved later traumas of the conflicts in that
place, Seamus Heaney produces a poetry prepared to enable catharsis.